rue that the human race
is undergoing some change always for the better in respect of its
material or moral conditions, which change will continue so long as the
race exists. In that case the course of Humanity will be comparable to
an upward road which the race will be always ascending toward heights of
welfare at present hardly imaginable. Such will be the course of the
race, but the course of the individuals will be something totally
different. It will for each be a progress not _up_ such a road, but
_across_ it, no matter at what altitude this crossing is made. Humanity
will always be nothing more than a procession passing from one turnstile
to another, the one leading out of, and the other leading into, a
something which always must be, for each individual, a nullity. Apart
from the individual, nothing which the human race knows as desirable can
exist; and, logically and practically alike, the only efficient
connection between the individual and the race must first of all be a
connection not with the race as such, and not with external nature, but
with something which is beyond both, and is not comprehended in either.

The only conceivable human being who will, apart from religion, ever be
able to describe himself as coextensive with the human race will, as
Nietzsche puts it in one of his most memorable sentences, be the last
man left alive when the rest of the human race is frozen. He, and he
only, will be able to say truly: "_Homo sum. Humani nihil a me alienum
puto._"

[5] In connection with the above questions, I may mention certain
others, all bearing on the relation of prose to poetry. It was said of
Plutarch that his sense of sound was so delicate that if it had been
necessary for the sake of mere verbal melody, he would have made Caesar
kill Brutus instead of Brutus killing Caesar. Closely bearing on this
criticism is the fact that in old English tragedies from the days of
Dryden onward a careful reader will note that, while parts of the
dialogue are in blank verse and parts in prose, the writers themselves
show, in many cases, a very defective appreciation of where verse ends
and prose begins, many passages which are printed as prose being really
unconscious verse. An interesting example of this may be found in a
passage from Bacon's _Essays_, which Macaulay quotes as an example of
the literary altitude to which Bacon's prose could rise. This passage is
in reality blank verse pure and simple. It is as fol